NOW ENTERING: Censorship Free Zone - buckle up and enjoy the ride
Censorship, control, disinformation, dogma, etc
A beautiful thing about steemit and all the other sites and tools that interface the blockchain is that it is a censorship free zone. YOU CAN flag posts as inappropriate, which may make them not visible or less visible depending upon which particular tool/site (e.g. steemit.com) you use to view the steem blockchain. Yet they cannot DELETE it from the blockchain.
So is disinformation still possible? SURE. You can literally say and talk about whatever you want here. However, unlike in PRESS, or controlled media sites, other people can investigate and respond to anything you say with their words as well.
It truly is a FREE SPEECH ZONE of infinite size.
It is a place where we can discuss many different things.
It is a place where if the Emperor has no clothes it will be revealed...
It is a place where the great and powerful Oz behind the curtain will be far easier for everyone to see...
It is a place where you could be terrified if the truth frightens you.
It is a place where you see a glimpse of utopian dreams if it is the truth you always seek.
It is also a free place so the negatives will not magically go away. Some very charismatic and smart individuals would likely attract followers. Will we see religions born from steem? There can be no censorship of people debating with those individuals, yet that does not defeat the nature of people to hear a person say something and think "He is so smart" and then choose to believe everything that person says after that will cease to vanish from human psychology.
Or as I hope will we help more people see they can think for themselves and we will not hate them for being an individual?
We will not hate the flat earthers, the communists, the capitalists, the creationists, the evolutionists, the scientists, the conspiracy theorists, or the totally insane. If we can be civil.
So far we seem to be doing a good job of that.
I hope it stays that way.
I did get a little less than civil with a flat earther, but it was only because I did not realize he was serious. That person is now going to pray for me. I didn't mean to insult him, and I do try to be civil yet that was clearly a case where I totally misread his initial post as satire when it was not. My bad.
I will try very hard to do better, though like everyone I DO make mistakes... Had I known he was serious I would have said nothing and left him be. Each person has their own path to walk. Some people I do not engage without an invitation to do so. He did not invite me to attack his beliefs.
This is actually the extreme true power of what's going to make steemit succeed.
Decentralized, true, free speech. I have no doubt that we're already going there.
I really hope so. I hope we can have a lot of freely flowing dialogue where people are open to things, and at the very least completely tolerant of each other.
That'd be a step towards healing or perhaps evolving (depending on perspective) our species in a positive direction.